News

April 10, 2017

Reza Abdoh (1963-1995) was a renown Iranian-American director and playwright known for his large-scale, experimental theatre productions. When he died of AIDS in 1995 at the age of 32, he was already one of the most compelling figures in American theater. Plays like Bogeyman, Quotations from a Ruined City, and Tight White Right were known for their hallucinatory dreamscapes, ferocious energy, and sheer sensory overload. Abdoh’s aesthetic language borrowed from BDSM, raves, talk shows, and the history of avant-garde theater. Twenty years after his passing, his company members, collaborators, friends, and family have come together to create a filmic tribute to his theatrical genius.

Directed by Abdoh’s long-time friend and collaborator, filmmaker Adam Soch, this feature-length documentary incorporates rare live performance footage and interviews, providing unprecedented insights into Abdoh’s life and his idiosyncratic creative process. Join the filmmaker and original members of Abdoh’s company, Dar A Luz, for a discussion preceding the screening.

The writer Jane Bowles passed away too early—in 1973 at the age of 56 after having spent two decades in the Moroccan port city of Tangier. At Tennessee Williams’ urging, The New York Times gave her a proper obituary, quoting John Ashbery: “Few surface literary reputations are as glamorous as the underground one she has enjoyed.” And yet despite her cultish following, she remains unknown to swathes of readers. The occasion of the Library of America’s publication of her collected works offers up a chance to look at her astonishing, antic work anew.

August 22, 2016

This issue of Bidoun was assembled in Cairo between March and April of 2011. It remains, if nothing else, a true record of an uncertainty — so rare that even those who experienced it can hardly imagine it today.

We’re making this Arabic-language version available more than five years later. We had originally hoped to launch it in Egypt, but the moment wasn’t right. We’re still waiting.

April 17, 2016

Founded in 2001 by a motley group of Tehran-based artists (including Bidoun contributing editor Sohrab Mohebbi), 127 quickly found itself at the vanguard of a progressive cultural moment in Iran. Their music melds Iranian melodies and jazz with an alternative sensibility, and features vocals in both Farsi and English. Part of the early 2000s Iranian rock revival, 127 were more irreverent, more playful, and more performative than their peers. Today, 127 members are dispersed between Tehran, New York, and Los Angeles and despite not having released or performed in years, they continue to yield a heavy influence in Iran and beyond. Join us at Le Poisson Rouge on May 6: Nadaareh nadaareh nadaareh!

The plan of her life was—surely—that she’d outlive her hero, Oscar Niemeyer, who drew till the age of 104. Or the shape-shifting Philip Johnson, one of her great supporters, who kept reincarnating himself until he was 98. Architects like them don’t retire, because there is no wall between their life and their work. There’s no after to a life of work. There’s just the world before you arrived and the world you want to see during your life. The rest is for eternity.

In an early interview with Alvin Boyarsky, Zaha said, “I almost believed there was such a thing as zero gravity. I can now believe that buildings can float.”

I always assumed she would defy the gravity of death, too. That those whorls of Issey Miyake or Yohji Yamamoto, wrapped around her with mathematical precision, accented by her obsidian, weapon-like jewellery, were more proof—as if it were needed—that she wasn’t really like the rest of us. Even though she was really interested in the rest of us (no one gossiped quite like Zaha).

Her approach—brusque and brutally honest—made a mockery out of the lame, xenophobic, misogynistic essentialism that dogged her in the press. Her name was forever prefixed by the adjectives “Arab,” “Muslim,” and “woman” in a way none of her contemporaries would be prefixed by “Occidental,” “Christian,” and “man.” I think it an insult to her, and to womankind, to refer to Zaha as “the most important female architect in the world.” In this her spiritual predecessor was the Brazilian architect Lina Bo Bardi—whose obdurate work out-toughs the toughest of male Brutalists, but never rhetorically engages gender in its making.

Right now, I’m thinking about our daily life some 20 years ago when I started work at her London studio. It was a converted school; we entered through the “Boy’s Entrance.” I was a fresh graduate. As such, I knew my way around post-structuralism but not much else. I was giddy to be at The Office of Zaha Hadid. I was convinced I’d been accepted into the heart of a living avant-garde. Here, I’d find the spirit of Malevich and Suprematism defiantly alive at the tail end of the 20th century, having survived the cultural wasteland of post-modernism and the pediments of revivalism.

My memories of those few years are vivid: the Broadway-level drama of Zaha’s arrival at the office each afternoon (which made Meryl Streep’s strop in The Devil Wears Prada seem positively quaint). How I never got Zaha’s cappuccino right (I’d never foamed milk before, OK? They don’t teach you that at Oxbridge). And the second-hand London black cab I used to drive Zaha around in (“Let’s stop at Maroush on the way.”) She also bought me designer clothing (style charity?). Shopping with her was so much fun.

But mostly I remember her incredible private kindness towards me, often forged in London traffic, inside that black cab, her in the back, and me up front, while I wondered, with all the intensity of a 22 year old, how did I get here?

Zaha did not see your preternatural age. All she cared about was whether your ambition was related, in kinship, to hers. (It also helped if you’d forsake sleep to better further it. Sleep is Kryptonite to architects.)

This private generosity was famously complimented by a default desire to publicly humiliate or berate you. But once I understood this was merely a lesson to affection’s paradoxical expression, an exercise in eccentric closeness, the jibes no longer felt like tiny spears, but soft snowflakes. I’ve probably never been so simultaneously cursed and valued at the same time.

I realised, even then, that this was a close-up experience with someone Really Historically Important. I stand by that. It should be a no-brainer. More importantly, for me, I was part of a totally unique world, full of singular individuals orbiting this relentlessly driven centre of gravity who was also so fucking hilarious. (Who else picks Drake’s Hotline Bling as one of their Desert Island Discs?)

Zaha went from cult famous to famous famous. Pop stars in silly hats believed a selfie with her made them even cooler. Because I had long left, there’s a lot less I can say about this expanding period of the office, as it grew into the architectural equivalent of a Chris Nolan film: indie blockbuster/boutique corporate. The future, as rendered in science fiction cinema, was also forever changed by Zaha’s futurism. Critical assessments aside, in the 21st century, the world caught up with Zaha’s visions. I’m so glad she lived to feel that glow.

There’s a painting attributed to Zaha from 1983 (though in fact, most were collaborative efforts). It’s an aerial view of a warped earth—floating shards of colour, tectonic plates colliding—colonised by several of her unbuilt projects, flying apart or tied together by an unnameable force. This painting is called The World (89 Degrees).

Friday 1 April 2016, 6:30pm721 Broadway [at Waverly Place], Room 674FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC. Refreshments will be served.

Who needs cinemas? They’re often accused of being anachronistic, of being out of synch with contemporary society’s increasingly privatised, on-demand and mobile viewing culture. Yet, around the world, there are a growing number of small, screening rooms that challenge digital fundamentalism, incubate experimental pedagogies, advance dialogues between creators and audiences, promote archival material that run counter to regional and national orthodoxies, think productively about their place in the cultural ecologies of gentrifying neigbourhoods, and labour towards creating an international network for challenged and challenging art in an era of downturn and permanent austerity.

LET’S BUILD A CINEMA! looks at the work of three new film spaces. Cimatheque, an alternative film centre in downtown Cairo that celebrates the diversity and power of film from the region and beyond, and that is dedicated not just to learning about cinema but to creating it. w o l f, located in a former brothel in Neukoln, Berlin and due to open in spring/ summer 2016, is a film space that includes resources for exhibitions, video installations and post-production facilities. Metrograph, recently opened on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, will project archive-quality 35mm and state-of-the-art digital video.

KHALID ABDALLA is an actor who has appeared in United 93, The Kite Runner and Jehane Noujaim’s Oscar-nominated The Square. A producer, filmmaker and alternative-media activist, he is a founding member of three collaborative ventures in Cairo: Cimatheque, Zero Production and Mosireen. He is also the lead actor in In The Last Days Of The City (2016).

TAMER EL SAID is a filmmaker living in Cairo. He co-founded Cimatheque and founded Zero Production in 2007 to establish an infrastructure for producing independent films in Egypt. His debut feature, In The Last Days Of The City, screened at MoMA’s New Directors/New Films series this month.

MARCIN MALASZCZAK co-founded production company Mengamuk Films, directed the award-winning Sieniawka (2013) and The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses Over The Hills (2015). He recently co-produced Tamer El Said’s In The Last Days Of The City which won the Caligari Prize following its premiere at the 66th Berlinale.

JAKE PERLIN is the co-founder and Artistic Director of the Metrograph in Manhattan and has previously programmed at BAMCinematek, Film Society of Lincoln Center, Alliance Francaise, Cinema Tropical, and the Human Rights Film festival in Zagreb. He is the Executive Director of Cinema Conservancy, a film production, preservation and consultation non-profit whose projects include the new film Peter And The Farm by Tony Stone.

VERENA VON STACKELBERG is founder and managing director of w o l f. She has been working in cinema exhibition, distribution and for international film festivals since 2003 for the likes of Curzon Cinemas an Artificial Eye in London, and Filmgalerie 451 and Berlinale/ Berlin International Film Festival.

December 5, 2015

A little magazine is like the start of a river. Sometimes you see a river alongside a mountain and it looks like nothing — it’s only trickling. Think of Holderlin’s poem about the Rhine. What I like most about that poem is the beginning — he starts in a little crevice, like a little hole, at the beginning of the Rhine. And that’s what little magazines are. That they rarely last is almost part of their nature. They are not meant to last. They are meant to follow one person’s impulse, to gather bits and pieces, works by poets, writers, and artists, which may become literature much later. In this way, small magazines are full of hope. We don’t know how long they will live, and they often disappear; but better to disappear than to become a bad magazine.

I started out with magazines of this sort both in Beirut and in the US. I was first published in America in a little magazine from New York called The Smith. It later disappeared. When a little magazine comes in the mail, it’s like receiving news of a birth. There is something charming, unpretentious, adventurous about them. As they get bigger, they start to have editorial policies and complications and the more they look for famous names. Well, how can you become famous if you don’t start somewhere? A little magazine is like a little gallery in an obscure, forgotten corner. What a pleasure to know a little place where you might discover one or two or three new things. Twenty years later, you discover that this or that person has become known — and usually less good, by the way.

In Beirut, I remember Antoine Boulad, who had started a little magazine called Mauvais Sang. I gave him some of my poems.

In Beirut, too, there was Shi’ir. Youssef Al Khal, Shi’ir’s editor, changed Arabic literature forever. Shi’ir was the most important literary event of the 1950s and 60s. Thanks to Shi’ir I was encouraged to return to Lebanon. I remember walking in Beirut and encountering what was one of the first galleries in the city. It was called Gallery One and it was run by Youssef and his wife Helen. We talked about poetry, because he was really a poet. He said to me, You write poetry, why don’t you send me some poems? I saw him a second time and he said, What are you doing in America? There’s a movement here! He had such enthusiasm, so I eventually sent him some poems from California, where I was living at the time, and before long I began to see him regularly. He was like a best friend to me.

Eventually, they closed the gallery and rented a basement across the street from his home in the Zarif neighborhood. Simone and I used to go there and very often there were young Lebanese emigres passing by during the summer. We would drink whiskey and wine and at midnight Youssef would say, Let’s see the paintings! He would open up the gallery and everyone would leave with a tableau under their arm.

In Morocco, there was a little magazine called Souffles run by Abdellatif Laabi. In July of 1966, I went to North Africa for the first time. I was in Rabat and the night before I had found a magazine in the street under the arcades. It was the fashion in Arab cities to have books spread on the sidewalk and people sitting on the floor looking at them. I looked through this magazine and was reminded of a man who had been a teacher in Beirut — my teacher — a French writer called Gabriel Bounoure. He had left Beirut in 1953 for Cairo, and a few years later, for Rabat. I didn’t see his name anywhere, but I read a few lines and thought, These must be his students. He had been like a guru for poetry, not at all a classic academic person. He had a way to give to poetry its full importance. Like Heidegger did. When I found that issue of Souffles I recognized in the poems the rarefied air, the intensity, the rigor, and the heated quality of the poems that Bounoure would have taught in his classes. Of course, I knew he had been banished from Lebanon by the French government, as he had openly criticized French policies in Algeria during the war.

Inside the magazine there was an address. It was published out of a house. So I looked it up and knocked on Laabi’s door at 8pm and a French woman came out. It was his wife’s mother, who told me that Abdellatif was at the hospital because his first child was about to be born, but she was expecting him home soon. I waited, and at 9pm or later he arrived. I said I am sorry, I am leaving tomorrow and I saw Souffles and I was sure you were one of Gabriel Bounoure’s students. He said Yes, of course I am.

During those years, we still believed in Arab unity, and people like Laabi wanted a United States of Arabia. I said to him that we won’t wait for the government: we will make our own Arab unity. I told him I was going to Beirut soon and I would talk about Souffles there. Later, he invited the Syrian poet Adonis to contribute to his magazine. I suppose I was the first one to make the connection between those two literary universes. Later, I sent him my poem on Palestine, “Jebu” — not the whole poem, but large excerpts. We remained great friends.

Souffles had a fantastic influence. A first generation of French Moroccans had a place to publish. It was a political magazine, too, and they took many risks. One of my favorite North African poets, Mostafa Nissaboury, published in Souffles, as did Tahar Ben Jalloun.

Years later, when Abdellatif was in prison, I wrote to him a lot. I stayed in touch with his wife and I remember her telling me that she had taken him the complete works of Engels to read. I thought, These books were so hard to read, so I sent him some art books to bring color to his jail cell. He would always say that our friendship had the same age as his first daughter.

January 30, 2015

Please join us for an eclectic reading session celebrating the launch of BIDOUN SINGLES, a new series of limited edition books featuring original commissioned artworks paired with new & old essays drawn from the Bidounisphere. For this first iteration, Los Angeles-based artist Tala Madani has prepared unique covers for classic Bidoun essays by Gary Dauphin (on American Jihadi John Walker Lindh), Anand Balakrishnan (on the Zionist vegetable and other allegories) and Sophia Al-Maria (on losing her virginity, again).

September 3, 2014

On the occasion of New Directions ’ publication of the writer Sonallah Ibrahim’s Stealth (Al Talassus), Bidoun and the legendary publishing house bring together a distinguished group of writers and scholars to reflect upon the predicament of the Egyptian intellectual in the year since President Mohamed Morsi’s dramatic fall. From Ibrahim himself to the bestselling author Alaa Al Aswany, countless writers and artists–many of them of historically contrarian bent–have expressed their support for a military-backed government whose abuses and excesses have on occasion surpassed those of the Mubarak era. How to begin to understand the role of the public intellectual in such times? Khaled Fahmy (American University in Cairo), Mona El Ghobashy (independent scholar), and Robyn Creswell (Yale University and poetry editor at The Paris Review) reflect on a year in which moral compasses have been cast hopelessly askew.

To be moderated by Negar Azimi.

August 25, 2014

The cultural wars between Iran and its left coast diaspora have long been played out in the realms of cinema, television, and music—from pre-revolutionary films such as Mamal Amrikai to the lyrics of pop songs such as Sandy’s Talagh. State television vs. satellite; aging divas vs. youthful rappers; parkour vs. the Shahs of Sunset: the Tehranis have historically portrayed the diasporic Iranian as effeminate, gaudy and morally loose, while the Tehrangelenos see the the Iranians as illiterate, perverted, obscurist bumpkins—that is, if they even acknowledge them at all! Maxx (Saman Moghadam, 2005) is an artifact from the Khatami-era of cross-cultural dialogue, where old stereotypes get some new clothes. The film was a domestic success in Iran, and one of the earlier instances of a non art-house film finding an audience within the diaspora. Can Tehran and Tehrangeles learn to love each other?

Post-screening discussion will be led Bidoun editors and accompanied by Armenian arak and ice cream generously provided by MILK.

January 31, 2014

Bidoun Presents Etel Adnan: To look at the sea is to become what one is

Bidoun at the Los Angeles Art Book Fair
January 31– February 2, 2014
The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA

Bidoun presents Etel Adnan: To look at the sea is to become what one is
Sunday, February 2, 2014, 11:30 am – 12:30 pm
Democracy Forum at the Japanese American National Museum
Across the courtyard from the Geffen Contemporary

Stop by our booth this week at the Los Angeles Art Book Fair and join us Sunday morning for a special screening and reading event to celebrate the forthcoming anthology To look at the sea is to become what one is: An Etel Adnan Reader (Nightboat Books, 2014) starring Bruce Hainley, Hedi El Kholti, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Rijin Sahakian, and Noura Wedell.

The Otolith Group‘s film I See Infinite Distance Between Any Point and Another (2012), shot largely in Adnan’s Paris apartment, centers on a reading of the first chapter of the renowned Lebanese-American artist’s poem, Sea and Fog. The sound of Adnan’s gentle voice, and the quiet but ever present ambient noise in her apartment, create a powerful, meditative atmosphere. If poetry can be understood as a study in constraint, the film, I See Infinite Distance Between Any Point and Another, can be understood as an experiment in concentration and a study of gestures, that speaks of the mobility of language and the movement of the ocean.

October 12, 2013

The Bidoun Library at the 2013 Carnegie International
October 5, 2013–March 16, 2014
Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh

The Bidoun Library is a presentation of printed matter, carefully selected with no regard for taste or quality, that attempts to document the innumerable ways that people have depicted and defined—slandered, celebrated, obfuscated, hyperbolized, ventriloquized, photographed, surveyed, and/or exhumed—that vast, vexed, nefarious construct known as “the Middle East.” The result is banal and offensive, a parade of stereotypes, caricatures, and misunderstandings, all the trappings of the Middle East as fetish: veils, oil, fashion victims; sexy sheikhs, sex with sheikhs, Sufis, stonings; calligraphy, the caliphate, terrorism; Palestinians. We wanted to see what would happen if we put together a library without regard to aptness or excellence; to choose books not for their subjects, but their contexts; not for their authors, but their publishers; not for their qualities, but in their quantities.

THE NATURAL ORDER

“Water was the first type of drilling fluid to be used, but when it became evident that superior drilling fluids could be made when certain clays were added, the art of mud control began.”

“The life of an immigrant family of three. Having been a violinist, the man is used to play violin when he is alone. The woman is working in an office and the eight-year-old child attends school. The man has problems with his wife. Being in a bad situation the couple can not help each other. But the child is aware of the problems.”